Her story is filled with incongruities. Tatiana Malinina is a Russian competing for Uzbekistan who trains in Dale City, Va., where she coaches herself with some help from her boyfriend.
She never had finished higher than seventh in a significant competition before October but has won three big ones since, including the Grand Prix Final two weeks ago.
She is, along with Naomi Nari Nam of the United States, the brightest new star of this post-Olympic figure skating season.
Nari Nam, 13, finished second in the U.S. championships but is too young to skate in the world meet that begins here today.
Malinina, 26, has started what seems like a second life in the Olympic-style side of the sport at an age when, of late, a woman skater would be long past finished.
“I don’t think age has any meaning,” Malinina sad. “One day, Michelle Kwan will be 26. Will they say to her, ‘You are 26 and still skating?”‘
Kwan, 18, is an odds-on favorite to win her second consecutive world title, and third in four years.
Oddly, both her leading rivals, Malinina and two-time European champion Maria Butyrskaya, also 26, of Russia, are old by figure skating standards.
“Everyone is always asking about her age,” said Malinina’s boyfriend, Roman Skorniakov. “Everybody thinks she is too old to compete. She thinks she is 16 and is skating like she is 16.”
This is Malinina’s seventh season at the elite level of women’s singles skating. The other six were almost singularly undistinguished.
She is a medal contender at the worlds after never having finished better than 13th in six appearances.
At the 1998 Olympics, where all the attention was on the battle between Kwan and Tara Lipinski for the gold medal, Malinina skated unnoticed to a solid eighth place.
“After the Olympics I started to skate with more confidence,” she said, “because I skated very well in the Olympics, even if maybe I was underscored.
“Before, no one paid any attention to me. They didn’t say I had nice jumps. I didn’t change, but suddenly everyone is paying so much attention to me.”
A 14th-place finish at the 1998 worlds, six weeks after the Olympics, made Malinina easier to overlook. Few imagined she would compete again in 1999, let alone set her sights on a 2002 Olympics when she would be a doddering 29.
“I didn’t stop because I love figure skating, and I can’t imagine a life without it,” she said.
Surprisingly for an older skater, the weakest part of her game is presentation.
“I can’t beat Michelle,” Malinina said. “I can almost match her on technical merit, but not on presentation. Her choreography and movements are so perfect.”
